e in matters
scientific and appreciated that figures drawn from them would add to
the significance of their own thoughts, so Dante would not have used
figures drawn from science only {354} that, closely in touch as he was
with the educated men of his time in many cities and countries, he
felt that he would thus not only be adding to the interest of his
work, but would be making his own meaning clearer by a wealth of
allusion from things scientific. This is indeed the side of this study
of Dante that deserves the most thorough consideration by educators in
our time, if they would understand what the real spirit of the
teaching of science in the medieval universities was, and what the
attitude of educated people of the time toward nature study, which has
been so egregiously misrepresented by those who know nothing at all
about it, must be considered to have been. All this we must judge,
however, from contemporary sources, and not from subsequent
supercilious misrepresentations.

It must not be thought, however, that Dante's interest in science was
exhausted by his excursions into astronomy. This has already been more
than hinted at in some of the passages quoted, which show his interest
in other phases of science. In the modern time, however, it is almost
the rule, that if a scholar who is not a scientist, and especially if
he happens to be, as Dante was, a literary man, indulges in some
scientific pursuits, he has at most but an interest in one branch of
science. Quite as often as not he rather prides himself on knowing
nothing at all about this department of knowledge. Specialism has
invaded even scientific education, and a man specializes in some
favorite department of science for his avocation, and is apt to know
very little about other departments. Dante was not thus constituted,
however. It will be comparatively easy to show that every form of
scientific thought interested him, and that his love of nature led him
into nature study, in the {355} best sense of that very modern term,
and caused him to make observations for himself, or so retain the
observations of others that he had heard or read, that he was able to
use them very forcibly and appropriately in the figurative language of
his great poem.

Alexander von Humboldt, the distinguished German naturalist and leader
of scientific thought in the early nineteenth century, whose
compliment to Albertus Magnus, quoted in the chapter on Science at the
Medieval Univ